by DeAnna Shires | January 6, 2017 10:18 pm
William Shakespeare was on to something enlightening when Jaques began the Monologue with All the World’s a Stage in the play As You Like It. We all want to be the Stage Manager of our own life, however, often we find ourselves living someone else’s life as a living puppet, while who we are at our core gets lost in the process.?Within this play we live, there is a great veil of illusion and the great illusion is caused by clouded perception often stemming from cognitive dissonance. In order to maintain our beliefs, values, ideals, we fail to realize the veil we come to depend on in order to give ourselves the feeling of control, which of course, makes us believe we are safe. In order to maintain false safety, we adopt a mask, becoming attached to our labels and demand others fall in line with our way of thinking, doing, and being, in order to keep our life playing out how we prefer it.
We can build a stage in our mind, assigning roles to the people we interact with, who then become actors in our life, rather than allowing them to be the beautiful imperfectly perfect beings they are with their own views and experiences. We can put words in their mouths and create experiences for them that aren’t true without them knowing it. We can do this all without their permission, but we cannot, without their permission, make them do or be anything they do not agree to. Like-wise, if we take the time to know ourselves, we can no longer be played by someone else’s dream as puppets of mind control. With this awareness, we can then choose to offer compassion and understanding while refusing to play dress rehearsal within someone else’s story.
Through quiet self-study or meditation one learns to calm an agitated mind in order to keep outside experiences from swaying us from knowing ourselves completely and loving ourselves fully. When we truly know and love ourselves, we are no longer bothered by other people’s view of who they think we are and we no longer try to fit people into roles we want them to play in our story. By stepping into a story more closely aligned in truth, we begin taking action, writing the story our heart knows is ours and the people in the story support it, while we support theirs as well. No longer are there puppets, only willing participants.
Once we understand the workings of our mind and the desires of our heart, we can express them to others firmly, but with manners:
No thank you. I don’t care for that outfit you picked out for me; it doesn’t fit. Those aren’t my shoes to fill.
No thank you. My story does not consist of enabling you to make the same mistakes over and over again at the expense of myself.
No thank you. I don’t need to buy into your script to “see” or “hear” you; we can agree to disagree and I can love you just the same because I “feel” you.
No thank you. I won’t re-wind and replay those negative words you said to me in my mind because I’ve checked and they do not resonate with my heart-mind-space.
No thank you. I don’t think I will stay in this chapter anymore and our contract is over until a sequel that resonates more harmoniously is written for both of us.
Yes, thank you for allowing me the freedom to be myself. Thank you for telling me I don’t need to play by your rules or become something I am not to please you and you do not need to change to please me. There is no need for masks here, because I fully see you and hear you without words, because within you, I see aspects of myself as a fellow human. Because of this life we share, I am not afraid to take a good, close, look at all aspects of both of us because I am my own Stage Manager and I happen to know the story I’m writing has a happy ending. I wish the same for you too.
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